I've blogged a "microranking" based on three-year federal judicial clerkship placement before, here. I've updated that to include the 2013 data, following up on posts about recent placement rates and the preliminary 2013 figures.

This ranking is based upon the American Bar Association data, self-reported by schools. "Federal clerkships" is an admittedly broad category, but it's still a useful one for comparison of schools.

As usual, part of this microranking (i.e., ranking on a single, narrow metric) is a "score," which scores the school on a 20-80 scale based upon its relative performance. The top school, on a percentage basis, will score an 80; the schools that placed none will score a 20; and others will fall on a spectrum based upon their relative performance. Like many rankings, this will illustrate that there is a "pyramid" of placement: the farther down the ranking one goes, the more compressed the schools are among the scores.

I thought a three-year average for clerkships (over 3600 clerks from the graduating classes of 2011, 2012, and 2013) would be a useful metric to smooth out any one-year outliers. It does not include clerkships obtained by students after graduation; it only includes clerkships obtained by each year's graduating class.

The "placement" is the three-year total placement; the "percentage" is the three-year placement divided by the three-year graduating class total.